Thursday, November 07, 2013

This is the first version which breaks compatibility with older Eclipse and Java versions, so, in order to run it requires Eclipse 3.7 onwards and Java 7 (for older versions, keep using PyDev 2.x) -- check LiClipse (http://brainwy.github.io/liclipse/), if you want a hassle free install where things should 'just work'.

This release has 2 main improvements: usability improvements related to configuring an interpreter and several enhancements in the interactive console.

On the interpreter configuration side, there were several improvements, but I believe the major change is that when the files related to the interpreter are changed in the filesystem (i.e.: when pip-installing a library for instance), PyDev will automatically get that the interpreter configuration needs to be updated (previously a manual step was required in order to add that path to the PyDev interpreter configuration). This was the most voted issue on the tracker and I believe one of the sources of greater frustration for PyDev users -- and it's finally solved! (which for me is the cherry in this release and warrants the newly-acquired 3.0 status!)

As for the interactive console, it has many noteworthy enhancements (and more enhancements are expected in the upcoming versions):

1. The interactive console can now execute in debug mode. By enabling this feature in the preferences, it's possible to place breakpoints in code, execute some code in the interactive console and stop at that breakpoint (which is really nice).

2. User Module Deleter (UMD): By enabling UMD in the preferences (i.e.: using runfileinstead of execfile to run a python module), dependencies imported when executing some code are reimported (so, changes in files are automatically gotten without requiring manual reload() calls).

3. IPython 1.0 is now supported. Also, %edit will open the file in the PyDev editor and %gui customizes the gui event loop integration (i.e.: %gui wx to enable wxPython backend).

Other features have also been added, including better handling of numpy arrays in the debugger, right-clicking a variable in the debugger > pretty print to pretty-print it, persistent history in the interactive console -- besides some important fixes.

The last thing is that LiClipse (http://brainwy.github.io/liclipse/) has also been released with the latest changes in PyDev 3.0 and now also supports Mako Templates and Dart (besides the languages it already supported, such as Django Templates, Javascript, HTML, C/C++, etc.)